Adriano Giannini Plays a Torture Survivor Who Goes Back to Argentina to Face His Captors in Marco Bechis’s ‘Ritorno a Buenos Aires’

On the penultimate day of the 83rd Venice Film Festival, the last of the five Italian titles in the Golden Lion competition is also the most personal on the slate. Ritorno a Buenos Aires, directed by Marco Bechis and led by Adriano Giannini, follows a man who spent 33 years rebuilding a life in Italy and then flies back to Argentina to sit in a courtroom and testify against the officers who kidnapped, tortured and enslaved him during the military dictatorship. It screened in the Sala Grande on 11 September.

Giannini plays Mariano Guerra, and the film is set in Buenos Aires in 2008 — the years when Argentina, having struck down its amnesty laws, finally reopened the trials of the men who ran the clandestine detention centres of the 1976–83 junta. Around him Bechis casts Argentine actors — Ana Celentano, Verónica Gerez, Olivia Nuss and Adrián Fondari — and builds the film less around the crime than around the strange arithmetic of having outlived it. “Being a survivor characterises you, it becomes your identity,” Bechis has said of the story, and the picture keeps its weight on that burden rather than on the atrocity itself.

For Bechis this is not a subject he arrived at through research. In 1977 he was seized by the Argentine army and held in a cell for around two weeks in one of Buenos Aires’ clandestine centres before being expelled from the country. That experience produced Garage Olimpo in 1999, which screened at Cannes in Un Certain Regard and remains one of the defining fiction films about the desaparecidos — the tens of thousands who were disappeared. Ritorno a Buenos Aires arrives a quarter of a century later and turns the camera to what comes after survival: not the cell, but the witness stand.

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That shift is the film’s real argument. Where Garage Olimpo put a viewer inside the machinery of disappearance, the new film is about testimony — the act of returning, decades on, to name what happened in front of a judge. It is a subject with obvious contemporary charge, because the Argentine trials are still running, still contested, and still dependent on ageing survivors willing to speak. Bechis, who was born in Chile, raised partly in Argentina and has worked for years out of Italy, is one of the few filmmakers positioned to tell it from both sides of the Atlantic at once.

Casting Giannini is its own statement. Best known to international audiences for physical, often glamorous roles, he is asked here to play interiority — a man whose whole drama is whether he can hold himself together long enough to give evidence. The Venice programme has leaned Italian this year, with five national titles in competition, and Ritorno a Buenos Aires closes that run on a co-production that is Italian in financing and language but Argentine in setting and memory.

It also lands as the political entry in a national slate that has otherwise stayed close to home this year. Where the other Italian competition titles have looked inward — chamber dramas, family reckonings, literary adaptations — Bechis points the Italian film industry outward, at a crime committed on another continent and at a justice system still trying to close the file. That reach is unusual for a competition film, and it gives the jury a title that argues for cinema as a form of witness rather than a form of memory.

Whether the jury led by this year’s president responds to it will be known within a day: the Golden Lion is awarded on 12 September. What is already clear is that Bechis has spent his career circling a single event, and has now made the film about the part that outlasts everything else — the survivor who has to go back. The film awaits Italian theatrical dates; an international release will follow its festival run.

Tags: Venice Film Festival, 2026, awards, Golden Lion, Adriano Giannini, Marco Bechis

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